ART, Yasmina Reza’s award-winning hit play, is a very odd thing, when you think about it. It is a play by a French woman dramatist, about three men (the women are only referred to as peripheral characters and frankly get a pretty bad rep), about male friendship and about art.
These are very French themes – we Anglo Saxons (and Anglo-Saxon men particularly) are not good at expressing feelings, and male friendship is generally rather blokish and sporty, or happens in the context of romantic or sexual attraction. Serge, Marc and Yvan genuinely love each other – but they have almost nothing in common, beyond a very long bond of friendship.
And Britain has a very twisted relationship with Art and Culture – we gave the world Shakespeare and Turner and Keats and Chaucer and … – but we don’t really talk about how we feel about art (well, politicians put a price/value on it, but that’s economics not Art). Whereas, across the Channel, the French talk and think about and really value culture, philosophy and ideas.
So how on earth did Art get to be such a huge hit with anglophone audiences? Go and see this latest, 30th anniversary, production of Reza’s play, which has been consistently in performance or on tour somewhere in the world ever since, and you will understand.
It is VERY funny. It doesn’t really need a comedian in the cast – although Seann Walsh demonstrates great acting ability along with brilliant comic timing. The Tuesday performance was unfortunately interrupted when an audience member was taken ill – when the play resumed, returning to the start of a tour-de-force speech by Yvan (Walsh) about the difficulties of pleasing everyone with the wedding invitations, he slipped in “Sorry if I am repeating myself” – it was so quick and rightly earned applause and laughter.
The plot of Art is very simple – Serge (Aden Gillett), a dermatologist, has bought a work of modernist art – a white canvas with a couple of lines, by a currently fashionable audience. It has cost 200,000 francs. Marc, his close friend for many years and a rigorously intellectual engineer by profession, is appalled. He derides and mocks the painting. His artistic choices are geared to history, heritage, Flemish landscapes etc.
Marc goes to see scatty Yvan (Walsh), currently working for a stationery company, and tells him about the painting. Yvan, soon to be married to his boss’s niece, is emollient, someone who always tries to see both sides and to smooth out conflicts. So he tells Serge he likes the painting, while suggesting to Marc that he doesn’t. He is more concerned about the impending nuptials and the complex relationships between step parents and real parents.
That’s it really. Is it Art – or is it a terrible waste of money by someone who has succumbed to a trendy fad? Just how far will Marc take his dislike of the painting and thus his disappointment with his best friend? How can Yvan stay friends with both, keep his mother happy while satisfying the demands of his father and Yvan’s step-mother and those of his fiancee and her father and step-mother? And what will Serge do to save the friendships?
Iqbal Khan directs this stylish and beautifully paced production, which is beautifully designed by Ciaran Bagnall.
Photographs by Geraint Lewis